Fred Durst Files Lawsuit Against Universal Music Group Claiming Over $200 Million in Unpaid Royalties
You may not like to admit that you owned a Limp Bizkit album back in the day, but a lot of you did. Hell, I should say that a lot of us did, because I owned the first three albums on CD when they were still fairly new. I’m not very proud of this, I’ve sought help for my poor taste in music, and I’ve come a long way. But still, a lot of us willfully paid money to listen to, at the very least, Significant Other. According to a lawsuit recently filed by frontman Fred Durst, a lot of that money may not have ever reached the band like it was supposed to.
Billboard reported yesterday that Fred Durst is suing Universal Music Group (UMG) saying that the label owes Durst and Limp Bizkit more than $200 million in royalties. The suit alleges that Durst, as of this past August, has not received any royalties from the label at all. According to Durst’s lawyers:
“Durst explained that he had been informed by UMG that he had not received any royalty statements because UMG told him over the years that it was not required to provide them since his account was still so far from recoupment. Durst’s representatives, suspicious that UMG was wrongfully claiming Plaintiffs’ accounts were unrecouped, suggested investigating further.”
Apparently this all began to come to light in April when Durst hired new representatives who went through his accounts and were shocked to find out that Durst had never received any money outside of upfront advances for albums, with Durst being told that his album sales had not recouped the amount he had been paid in upfront advances. Considering that you couldn’t turn on MTV in the late-90s and early-2000s without seeing that stupid backwards red Yankees cap, that’s a very suspicious claim.
When Durst’s new representatives contacted the label, they found out that Limp Bizkit had accounts with more than $1 million dollars in royalties that the label “failed to alert” them about. That’s a hell of a lot of money to just forget to give someone. So the representatives, now suspicious, decided to take a look around and dig a little deeper into the situation.
What the representatives then found was that UMG didn’t issue any royalty statements during large portions of the band’s career, most particularly the years when everyone was singing “I did it all for the nookie!”
“UMG’s failure to issue royalty statements in particular from 1997-2004 — the height of the band’s fame and during periods in which they made record-breaking sales — with respect to its most popular albums suggests that UMG was intentionally concealing the true amount of sales, and therefore royalties, due and owing to Limp Bizkit in order to unfairly keep those profits for itself.”
In addition to withholding royalties from Limp Bizkit album sales, Durst also started his butt-rock record label, Flawless Records, in 1999 which was a division of Geffen Records which was, in turn, a division of—you guessed it—UMG. The lawsuit also alleges that there’s a ton of missing royalties from Flawless Records as well.
As the lawsuit reads:
“Given the vast amounts of money collected by UMG in relation to sales of Limp Bizkit’s and Flawless Records’ albums over the years … UMG is liable to plaintiffs for tens of millions of dollars in copyright infringement, if not more. Indeed, Plaintiffs allege that the amounts owed to them by UMG following the rescission of these agreements will easily surpass $200 million.”
That means that the lawsuit is looking for, not just those royalties, but a voiding of the band’s contract with UMG, the return of their copyrights, and copyright infringement damages. That amounts to a lot of $3 bills that are allegedly owed to the rap-metal giants.
While it’s funny as hell to see the words “Limp Bizkit” appear in actual legal documents, especially considering what the band name means, it’s a serious accusation against a very big corporation, and it could potentially lead to further scrutiny of other artists’ contracts with UMG. We’ll see what comes of the legal proceedings and all of the he says/she says bullshit as the lawsuit unfolds.
